I’m not sure where to tear into this press release…
- Shall I start with the non-existent “international presence” of Livedoor? As far as Om Malik is concerned, there was no annoucement of Livedoor’s intent to purchase, only an annoucement of the acquisition. So if there is an “International presence” for Livedoor, this is the first anyone has heard of it.
- I’m not going to spend time to dig deep into this acquisition, but it smells fishy from the outset:
“ClickDiario’s proprietary network consists of over 30 vertical websites which are visited by over 45 million unique users per month. The company’s main websites include portals such as Deportes.com (Sports), Salud.com (Health), Mujer.com (Women), Mascotas.com (Pets), Boletines.com (Newsletters), Dietas.com (Diets), and Tarjetas.com (Greeting Cards), among others.”
If I had put together a portal site having bought out a number of general popular word URLs, and placed relevant content on those sites, that might approximate what ClickDiario is supposed to have done. Prove me wrong- are any of these sites truly influential to a wide audience of Spanish-speaking Internet users? Maybe all Livedoor wants are these URLs?
- Shall I mock the idiot PR flack who wrote this line, “Livedoor is one of the largest web portals in the world, as well as the leader in web blogs and web blog search in Japan.” Obviously someone who has never read or written a blog. If Livedoor purports to be a leader in “web blogs” then they better know how to spell the term properly.
- Or how about this line, “For more information, visit http://corp.Livedoor.com/en .” Which currently goes to a 404 page not found. This press release was made publically available on Friday September 30, 11:46 am ET. It’s October 3rd and the link in the PR is still dead. Let’s see how long it takes for them to fix either the link or the PR.
Livedoor Completes Acquisition of ClickDiario.com: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance
UPDATE: Richstyles’ comment made me want to dig a bit deeper.
- deportes.com Alexa ranking? 33,222
- salud.com Alexa traffic ranking? 75,326
- mujer.com Alexa traffic ranking? 95,115
- mascotas.com Alexa traffic ranking? 172,715
- boletines.com Alexa traffic ranking? 77,195
- tarjetas.com Alexa traffic ranking? 15,248
- ClickDiario.com Alexa traffic ranking? 15,199
SECOND UPDATE: ok, ok, I just had to share this. Richstyles points us to the proper English-language PR page for Livedoor. Only it hasn’t been updated since early 2004!!!
It’s a roughly 10 million US$ acquisition so as you say, it’s probably for the domain and maybe Spanish speaking staff. They also own myrice.com in China.
They are sitting on a couple hundred million dollars from their greenmail attack on Fuji Network so I’m sure we’ll see a bigger acquisition in the near future. However, I don’t think he’s as foolish as Rakuten to buy something like linkshare.
http://en.livedoor.com/press/index.asp
This PR also struck me funny – glad to find your comments on it!
Glad to see people valuing Latam web traffic on the one hand, but it sickens me to see clickdiario getting rewarded for such crap. they produce no unique content for the web, they don’t appear to place any value on ensuring the quality of the health content that they post, etc, etc.
My company runs several well trafficked health web portals in latin america, so I may not be entirely bias free, but I would agree with your assessment that these sites are picking up random traffic and junking up search engine results strictly from their longevity, and not at all due to any sort of public appeal and/or ‘influence’.
I guess if I was sitting on $100MM i’d make some stupid purchases, too
its incredible how jelous you all are! Check out comscore media metrix report, clickdiario appears on top of AOL , UOL and other big internet companys in latinamerica! I work in an interactive ad agency in latinamerica and I can tell you this company is doing preatty well in our region.
I think clickdiario’s traffic and reach is from “the network” they handle and have signed not only from their sites
Check the alexa rank for cdmetrix.com that it’s one of their adservers and youll see 1000 traffic rank, maybe in latin america that’s huge